SCM Studyguide Church History: SCM Study Guide

By Stephen Spencer

An introduction to the study of the ways the church has evolved in its corporate life since its birth in the first century. Special attention is given to studying its changing relationship and interaction with the surrounding societies in which it has existed. The intended readership will be those training for ministry in English speaking churches,

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Aug 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9780334051534

Stephen Spencer

Stephen Spencer is Director for Theological Education at the Anglican Communion Office, London.

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SCM STUDYGUIDE TO CHURCH HISTORY

SCM STUDYGUIDE TO CHURCH HISTORY

Stephen Spencer

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© Stephen Spencer 2013

Published in 2013 by SCM Press

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Contents

Preface

1. Studying Church History

Why Study Church History?

How to Study Church History?

This Studyguide

A Framework

2. The Apostolic Church: Meeting or Community?

Birth in Jerusalem

Common Life

Division and Expansion

Self-understanding: Ekklesia

3. The Hellenistic Church: Sect or Association?

Into the Hellenistic World

Persecution and Devotion

Right Believing

Self-understanding: From Ignatius to Cyprian

4. From Constantine to Byzantium: A State Church?

The Fourth-Century Revolution

The Establishing of the Church

The Rise of Monasticism

Self-understanding: Augustine’s Two Cities

5. The Rise of the Western Church: Tribal or Catholic?

From the Sixth to the Ninth Century: Germanic Tribes and the Rise of Islam

Monasticism: Benedict and the Celts

Roman Christianity from Gregory to Charlemagne

Self-understanding: Bede on the Synod of Whitby

6. Medieval Catholicism: Papal or Monastic?

Papal Power Struggles between the Tenth and Thirteenth Centuries

Monasticism: From Cluny to the Cistercians

Renouncing Wealth: The Franciscan and Dominican Friars

Self-understanding: Aquinas on Princely Government

7. Reformation Churches: Monarchical or Congregational?

The Weakening of the Papacy after 1300

Luther’s Reformation

Loyola and Tridentine Catholicism

Self-understanding: Church as ‘Congregation’

8. Churches of the Enlightenment: Communal or Voluntary?

Reformed Protestantism and ‘the Elect’

Pietism and the Rise of Feeling in Religion

Enlightenment and Revolution!

Self-understanding: Schleiermacher’s Writings

9. Churches in the Modern Era: Communities or Cells?

Ultramontanist Roman Catholicism

Protestantism’s Growing Diversity

Serving the Needs of the World

Self-understanding: Moltmann on ‘Grass-roots Communities’

10. Local Church History

Further Reading

Glossary

Preface

There is renewed interest in Christian history. The recent television series by Diarmaid MacCulloch and his book A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years reflected this and encouraged it. Jonathan Hill, Robert Bruce Mullin, Stephen Backhouse and Miranda Threlfall-Holmes have also recently published accessible and attractive surveys of a vast subject. Yet, there is still a need for a one-volume introduction to the study of the history of the institution of the Church, looking at the development of its corporate life especially within the Western setting, with attention to some of the key texts. This volume seeks to fill the gap.

The chapters that follow build on my two earlier SCM Studyguides. The first, Christian Mission, described the broad nature of God’s saving purpose in history and especially its manifestation in Christian mission through the centuries. The rich diversity of the ways the Church has participated in the missio Dei emerged clearly from that survey. The second, Anglicanism, looked at what that mission has meant for the individual disciple, especially within one denominational tradition, that of Anglicanism. It traced different ways that scripture, tradition and reason have guided the Christian life. This third volume looks at what Christian mission has meant for the corporate life of the Church, especially as the Church has participated in the cross currents of human history and its surprising variety of organizational forms. I am grateful to Natalie Watson and SCM Press for giving me the opportunity to write about these interrelated topics in an extended way. I need to point out that there are points of contact between the stories told in the three volumes, and figures such as Augustine, Luther and John Wesley, and some of the things they wrote, appear in more than one place.

I am grateful to Stephen Platten, the Bishop of Wakefield, for granting me some study leave to complete this volume. I am again grateful to my wife Sally for reading through the entire book and making corrections.

Finally, I must again thank the ordinands of the Yorkshire Ministry Course for listening to and encouraging my teaching on all these topics. This volume is dedicated to them in gratitude for all they have given me.

1. Studying Church History

Why Study Church History?

The study of history helps us to live our lives in the present. This is because, as Rowan Williams has written,

history is a set of stories we tell in order to understand better who we are and the world we’re now in; as a written affair, it is never just a catalogue of things that happen to have happened. It is bound to be making judgements about the importance of what it deals with, and often – always? – has some element of moral judgement not far below the surface. We start telling the story to get a better definition of who we are or of what the subject is that we’re describing: history helps us define things. Good history makes us think again about the definition of things we thought we understood pretty well, because it engages not just with what is familiar but with what is strange. It recognizes that ‘the past is a foreign country’ as well as being our past. (Williams 2005, p. 1)

The study of church history, then, is a way of exploring and rediscovering an understanding of what the Church is today. As texts are examined and evidence assessed, it is usual to find that inherited notions and images, such as the Church as a state institution, with hierarchies and laws and civil power, can give way to other more fluid images, such as the Church as a movement of ideas or association of friends. It is a discipline that can uncover strange and unsavoury aspects of the Church’s life, as in the history of the Crusades, as well as inspirational and uplifting episodes, as in the rise of different monastic orders, in which men and women have turned their back on worldly riches to seek God in the desert or slum. The study of church history forces us to re-think and re-define what Jesus’ followers, an assorted group of men, women and children from across the centuries, might actually be.

How to Study Church History?

History cannot be the attempt to create a complete account of all that happened, a meta-narrative that answers all questions and settles all disputes. This would require an encyclopedic coverage of all aspects of the subject as well as the ability to see history from every point of view, which only God can have! But nor can history just be the detailed study of specific episodes or personalities with no attempt to place them within the bigger picture. This would result in the reader getting lost in a jungle of detail. Broad patterns of development and meaning need to be traced. We need a map of the whole within which to locate the specific parts.

But we also need to recognize the limitations of such maps because they can only be drawn from one point of view. They are the view from one location on the planet, at one point in time, with all the limitations and unfinished business that that implies. The historian needs to acknowledge how other perspectives are also valid and also deserve to be recognized. In this way, history itself is never finished: the publication of scholarly books on episodes and people is always an invitation for other studies to be written from different and complementary perspectives, to add to and enrich our understanding of what has gone on.

History depends on the work of others. The monographs and surveys of historians provide ‘secondary literature’ which give orientation and a point of departure as we begin our own reading and research. But behind these books lie the ‘primary sources’, those documents, records, artefacts and buildings that come from the period itself. The student of history needs to ‘read’ and become familiar with all of these, because they provide the raw data of history. They reveal how the past is ‘a foreign country’ but they also allow that past to be rediscovered in new and fresh ways.

But primary sources need interpreting. The reader needs always to ask who are the author or authors, what their point of view may have been, and why they were producing the document or artefact in the first place. Then a critical perspective can be acquired, one which allows the historian to gain a sense of perspective on what they are studying and so be able to begin to weigh and evaluate its meaning and importance.

This Studyguide

Church history is obviously a vast subject and it is easy to get lost in the woods of detail. A specific line of enquiry is needed to give shape and direction to the study, one that also allows the bigger mapping exercise to take place. This Studyguide will explore one question that is both specific and general in its scope, a question coming from those involved in the ‘emerging church’ and ‘fresh expressions’ movements in different parts of the Western world at this time. The question comes out of the contrast between these new congregations which often meet in places like gyms, schools, pubs and clubs, and traditional church building-based congregations, and it is this: what kind of body is the Church? Traditional congregations have assumed that their pattern of corporate life provides the answer, with regular Sunday services, leadership structures, membership roll and authorized financial arrangements. The new ‘emerging churches’, on the other hand, are seeking different or ‘fresh’ ways of being the Church, ways that change the inherited pattern in a range of fundamental ways. For example, they may not meet on Sundays, they may not work with a structured approach to leadership and they may not have anything resembling a membership roll or budget or annual accounts. Are they still churches? What is actually required to be a real Church? Is it necessary, for example, for a church to have an existence at one remove from the society or community in which it is found, or can it just be one facet of that wider life, as when a school or hospital employs a chaplaincy team to minister to the whole institution? Does a church need a legal constitution or to be financially independent or have its own building? In other words, can a church be part and parcel of a wider society and therefore be integrated and identified with it, or is it a body that needs to exist in its own right and therefore needs to stand apart from that society in important respects?

This is a question about the organizational form of the Church. Helen Cameron has recently studied and written about this topic, drawing on the recently established discipline of organizational studies. In Resourcing Mission (2010), she provides an answer, which is not one answer but five. She identifies five genres or cultural forms of organization that are widespread in the range of churches found in contemporary Western society. Her forms can be summarized as:

Public utility: providing an essential service; covering the country; without a membership but having legal officers.

Voluntary association: having a definite membership; with set procedures for members to run the association themselves and with an agreed aim.

Friendship group: a voluntary and informal body; the aim is fellowship.

Third-place meeting: occurring within a public space (e.g. café, pub); constrained by the limits of that space; with a shared aim which can be changed by agreement.

Network resource: providing support to a group of people who already have a shared and stated aim.

(based on Cameron 2010, pp. 24–37, see also Cameron et al. 2005)

The fundamental contrasts between the different forms can be seen in this list. For example, if a church is a public utility that serves a whole population, it cannot be a voluntary association with a membership list. Churches will ultimately be one or the other, though they may have elements that recall other forms. But the terminology that Cameron uses is clearly drawn from a twenty-first-century setting. To use this framework in church history will require some adaptation. In this Studyguide, the following slightly different set of terms will emerge from our survey: the Church as a state institution (for 1); voluntary association (as in 2); devotional circles (for 3); meetings or cells within a wider community (for 4); ordered network (for 5). In addition to these five, we will occasionally find the Church being a community, as in a self-sufficient commune, or, more extremely, as in a sect. This can be labelled as number 6.

Is one form right and the others wrong? Each has had its place, but as our survey unfolds, judgements about the appropriateness of each form in their changing social and religious settings will emerge, for moral judgement cannot be avoided in historical study, as Rowan Williams pointed about above. In different language, it can be said that church history and ecclesiology are intimately related.

The history of the Church shows a fascinating interaction of Church and society, at global, national and local levels, with different forms of church life emerging and then disappearing again. It is an interaction that has gone through several discernible phases of development over the centuries and in different places. We shall examine a set of ‘moments’ in this unfolding story, moments that clearly illustrate the major phases and, together, build up an overview.

But the chapters that follow will not attempt to provide a complete or final account of that story. There is not enough space and, more importantly, to attempt such a thing would be to attempt to produce the kind of metanarrative of history that was criticized above. Instead, they will assemble information about some of the key events and personalities, quote some of the key statements and let a theologian or church leader from each era express what is distinctively new about its self-understanding. Each chapter will ask further questions about the contemporary application of what has been uncovered. Readers will be encouraged to go further into the subject by doing their own research and taking the debate forward in different ways. Hence lists of further reading will be included at the end of each chapter.

The Studyguide also has a Western bias, especially in the later chapters, because this is of most relevance to the intended readership, who are those participating in the life and ministry of Western and especially English-speaking churches. It will provide them with their own family history, as it were. Other traditions and branches of the Church have much to teach, but in an introductory volume like this the priority must be to answer the question ‘who do you think you are?’

A Framework

First of all it is necessary to introduce Christian history as a whole, which is the setting for the more specific subject of church history. The next few pages will provide a panoramic canvas on which to explore the changing forms of the Church. A tried and tested way to do this is to sub-divide the two millennia of Christian history into its major phases or eras and present a portrait of each in turn. This Studyguide follows Hans Küng’s sub-division in his well-known Christianity: Its Essence and History (English translation 1995). Küng divides the history into six major eras: Jewish Christian or Apostolic; Hellenistic; Medieval Catholic; Reformation; Enlightenment Modern; and Postmodern. This book will broadly follow these divisions except that the longest of his eras, the 1,000 years of Medieval Catholic Christianity from Constantine to the medieval period, will be covered by three chapters rather than one, making eight chapters in all. Furthermore the subdivision of the last two eras will be slightly different. Küng brackets together the Enlightenment and the modern era, lasting from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century, with his final era being the current or ‘postmodern’ age. But there is still considerable debate as to whether a postmodern age can clearly be distinguished from the modern age. For historians it seems too soon to be making a hard and fast distinction (though not, perhaps, for missiologists: see Spencer 2007). This Studyguide makes a slightly different division, with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries receiving their own chapter under the title ‘Churches of the Enlightenment’, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries receiving a chapter with the title ‘Churches in the Modern Era’. These pages will not venture into the twenty-first century or enter the debate about whether postmodernity exists.

Palestinian origins

The first Christians inhabited three different worlds. They came from a Jewish Palestinian background with the worldview of first-century Palestinian Judaism. This was dominated by eschatology, and specifically by the belief that the end of the age was near, a time of war and floods and death. The ardent hope and expectation was that a messiah would then appear, as described in the book of Daniel (e.g. 7.13, 12.1–4), who would throw off Roman oppression and usher in a new age of liberation and prosperity for the people of Israel.

But they also lived within a world of trade and commerce, which generally used the Greek language as the medium of communication and which was heavily influenced by Greek ways of thinking and communication. Finally they were also under the authority of the Romans, who were the superpower of the day, controlling and colonizing many parts of the Mediterranean world and whose soldiers commonly taxed and demanded bribes from ordinary citizens.

Jewish Christians saw Jesus as the long expected messiah and many believed that he would return with power within a generation (e.g. 1 Thess. 4.15ff.). They were filled with a sense of urgency that this was the final hour. They believed they were to go out to as many people as possible to alert and prepare them for the coming of the messiah and the end of the age. The days were short, the end times were near, and destruction was just around the corner. It was imperative to get people to turn to the Lord so that they would repent, get their lives in order and be ready for his coming. In 1 Corinthians 7.29–33 we are given a glimpse of how this worldview affected the life of the first Christians in the Jewish diaspora: they were not to be over-concerned with everyday affairs of the world but were to be ready for the end.

The question to be faced in the next chapter, from a number of angles and in greater detail, is how all this shaped the nature and form of the Church itself.

Within the Hellenistic world

As Christianity spread beyond Palestine and around the Mediterranean world it came to be dominated more and more by Greek language and culture. This was the world of trade and commerce, under the control of the Roman Empire but using the Greek language as the medium of communication. Language draws on culture and learning for its vocabulary, and Greek language drew on Greek learning and philosophy. In this, the influence of Plato and Neoplatonism should not be underestimated. This was an outlook that did not see reality in linear terms, as an extended story with a beginning in the past, a present and a future that was still awaited. Instead it saw the visible and material world as a set of changing and ephemeral reflections of an eternal and unchanging world. The real world is the world of the forms, which are eternal realities found in such things as truth, goodness, beauty and virtue. Our visible world reflects these to a greater or lesser extent, and the purpose of human life is to gain understanding and knowledge of these things and so be freed from the shackles of earthly existence.

All of this had a profound influence on the Church and the way it understood the Kingdom. Beginning in the latter part of the first century, a shift of emphasis began to occur, away from expectation that the Kingdom would come in the near future, to one of believing the Kingdom could be accessed here and now, through wise teaching and worship. A shift from a futurist eschatology to a realized eschatology began to occur. This is seen in John’s Gospel, where judgement and eternal life are sometimes described as being already present in the world (e.g. 5.21–4). It continued with the Apologists such as Justin Martyr, who described how Christianity was in deep accord with Greek learning and philosophy, and continued with the brilliant and creative Alexandrian theologian Origen. It also accounts for why the early Church invested so much time and energy in developing the Creeds. The reason is that if access to the eternal life of the Kingdom is gained through right understanding, it is crucial that the Church has a correct definition and description of what this right understanding might be. The development of orthodoxy (right understanding) replaced the earlier Jewish emphasis (from the Prophets) on orthopraxis (the right practice of justice and righteousness).

This Hellenistic phase of Christianity continued with the development of the Orthodoxy of Byzantium, in which the Liturgy became the central expression of Christian discipleship. It saw the development of the catechumenate, a forty-day period of preparation for baptism at the Easter Vigil. This was the origin of the season of Lent.

Catholic Christianity from Constantine

The next era had its roots in the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the year 312. He rose to power through the defeat of his brothers who had been co-rulers of the Empire. During his rise to power he became committed to the Christian religion, which he legalized in the year 312. It quickly became established as the religion of the Empire. Constantine took control of the affairs of the Church and called the bishops to his winter palace at Nicea in Asia Minor (modern-day Iznik in Turkey). There he made the bishops agree on a creedal statement which became the basis of the Nicene Creed. The bishops and the emperor’s officials were now to work together, supporting and strengthening the work of both. The Nicene canons show the Church becoming an arm of the Roman government. This shows a marriage of Church and state, that would later be called Christendom.

The alliance would remain a dominant reality in both East and West for a thousand years.